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Ok, it's about time I wrap up Hamburg, before starting the multi-chapter book that will be Berlin.
It's Thursday morning, and I've had 5 hours sleep in two days, so I'm starting to feel a bit worse for wear. Still, the damage isn't grievous (yet), so I pull on my stompin' boots and head out a-walking for the day. I find a giant warehouse by the harbour, cheerfully emblazoned with the German for 'Miniature Train Wonderland'. Naturally, the four-year old in me marks this one down on the map for further exploration when I'm less weary. I also find a cafe that I'd heartily recommend to any visitors to Hamburg, 'Erika's Ecks'. I ordered the most disgusting-sounding dish on the menu (sour-flesh in pig-jelly with fried potatos), and would you know, it's f***ing lovely. I can only imagine how nice the less gross dishes are.
Having wandered all day, I head back to the hostel and cook up a yummy curry for myself and the others, (I miss my kitchen) and then a most excellent chocolate cake. Tip for wannabe travelers reading this; Nothing makes you friends as fast as having something easy, cheap and tasty up your culinary sleeve. It also gets you beer, which may or may not be more important.
Then I spruce myself up, down a red bull, and let the Troublesome Twosome lead me out to the ReaperBahn, where the Hamburgers (is that what you call people from Hamburg? I hope so.) keep all their most garish bars, clubs and strip joints. We find a side road almost completely covered with neon lights, and down there is a small bar, with tequila shots for 50 damn cents. Now, as we power our way through them, we have a very intellectual and not-at-all-slurred discussion on the nature of tequila. When mentioned in the cold, sober light of day, everyone and his mother will swear that tequila is the devils drink, and that after that time it crept into their room and tried to kill them in their sleep, they've sworn off it forever. All the way up to the bar, they will protest any thought of buying the evil liquid, the "taste makes them feel ill", the smell reminds them of too many coyote ugly moments, they never want to wake up hanging upside-down in a gimp mask and clown costume in a dungeon cell ever again, and so on and so forth.
And yet I've never seen any reaction from someone presented with a tequila shot, other than "Tequila?! f*** YEAH!!!"
Our theories are many, and include, but are not limited to, government conspiracy, alien experimentation and genetic manipulation. I personally believe it to be witch-craft. Sneaky bloody mexicans. Still, we test the reaction potential on a hapless group of Dutch guys, and before we know it, six 50cent tequila shots have morphed into three pints of beer for each of us. Such power!
Things speed on, and at the club over the road we all lose rather embarrassingly at a game of 'Gay, Straight or European?', a successor to the ever-popular 'Boy, Girl, or Lesbian?'. The answer, I've found, is that if you have to play the game at all, it's usually European. Leaving Luise to finish dancing with one very confusing man, Wiebke and I, sobering up and starving hungry, head home to enjoy a breakfast of leftover curry.
Which some b****** had eaten.
They didn't even clean the pan. Incandescent with RAGE, I instead conjure up the most resentful scrambled eggs I've ever made, whispering hate-filled curses and vows of vengeance toward the rest of man-kind. Still it wasn't anything compared to how completely I was going to lose my s*** in a couple of nights...
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